The present invention is directed to a method for the transmission of a telefax message.
The medium of telefax (telecopying) is presently widespread and will experience further acceptance, particularly with the continued expansion of integrated services digital networks (ISDN). In addition to delivering a telefax message to exactly one receiver, it is known to transmit the identical telefax message to a plurality of receivers (see European Patent Application No. 83 90 2700.0 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 4,646,160); Review of the Electrical Communication Laboratories 33 (1985) No. 1, pages 31-39, Shimamura, "Design for Facsimile Storage and Conversion Processing in STOC-201"). The product information of Siemens AG "System Hicom 300 Tele-Communications-Service", Order No. A19100-K3163-G585 discloses a communication system that has the performance feature of "multi-address transmission of telefax messages" (pages 6ff of the product information). In this communication system the same telefax message can be communicated to as many as 50 different receivers. When exactly one telefax message in the known communications system is to be transmitted to a plurality of addressees, all appertaining telephone number data or other address-related data are communicated from a transmission-side terminal equipment to a reception-side terminal equipment. Given a plurality of address-related data received at the reception side, the operator of the telefax equipment at the reception side is then confronted with the difficulty of identifying whether the received telefax message is in fact intended for the user or users of the telefax terminal equipment at the reception side. Given a plurality of users in a commercial or official area that, for example, can be reached via a common telefax terminal equipment at the reception side, a corresponding identification of the users that are to receive the telefax message can take a relatively long time.